Free Republic

Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields has quietly tapped a presidential campaign veteran for her mayoral run later this year, The Post has learned. Fields has hired Diane Feldman, who polled women's issues for Sen. Kerry's presidential bid. She will poll New Yorkers on various issues for Fields.

IF Mayor Bloom berg fends off con servative chal lenger Thomas Ognibene in the Republican primary, he's likely to face the former councilman in the general election as the candidate for the Conservative Party, The Post has learned. So Bloomberg better start worrying about November and find a way to make sure that a big chunk of his base doesn't defect to a Republican Ralph Nader. Ognibene, leader of the Republicans on the City Council during the Giuliani administration, announced over the weekend that he would challenge Bloomberg. Like many Republicans in this city, he cited dissatisfaction with the mayor...

The intense courtship of black voters for the 2005 mayor's race begins today, when Mayor Bloomberg and all those wishing to unseat him head uptown to the Rev. Al Sharpton's annual Martin Luther King Day celebration to stump for votes.

January 3, 2005 -- Mayor Bloomberg kicked off the new year — and his re-election campaign — by picking up an endorsement from one of the most influential black ministers in the city yesterday. Rev. Floyd Flake, a former Democratic congressman who preaches to the 10,000-member congregation at The Greater Allen AME Cathedral in Jamaica, Queens, said Bloomberg was "the most qualified candidate."

City Council Speaker and all-but-announced mayoral candidate Gifford Miller soon will have raised enough money to spend the maximum allowed in the Democratic primary — and he's done it with record-setting speed, The Post has learned. Despite anemic poll numbers and a lack of name recognition outside Manhattan, the 35-year-old's bulging campaign war chest will surpass the primary-spending ceiling of $5,728,000 when he files his financial report with the Campaign Finance Board on Jan. 15, aides predict.

After three years out of the public eye and with bitter memories of the 2001 mayoral primary still strong, Democrat Fernando Ferrer has landed in an unfamiliar position — front-runner — in the race to oust Mayor Bloomberg. That status is both a blessing and curse for the former Bronx borough president: His allies think his best chance to face Bloomberg on Election Day is to avoid another Democratic runoff, but being at the top of the party heap puts a huge target on his back.

In 2001, New York Times... liberal columnist Anthony Lewis was asked: "Have you changed your views on socialism?" Lewis' answer: "I'm still for it. But it doesn't work." ...Never underestimate "the power of bad ideas." No matter how successful some of the policies... since the early '90s have been, they'll always have critics on the left who treat accountability, self-reliance and high standards as the enemies of the downtrodden.... Welfare reform: One of the biggest successes of the Giuliani administration was its program of welfare reform, launched long before the federal Welfare Reform Act of 1996. When Giuliani came into...